[Info-vax] Reading Gordon Bell's VAX strategy document

[Neil Rieck]

On Thursday, September 28, 2023 at 3:49:37 PM UTC-4, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Johnny Billquist wrote: 
> > There were of course development, and testing done between machines 
> > and so on. But that was not "ARPANET". ARPANET was running NCP until 
> > flag day, when it officially switched to IP.
> NCP and TCP operated in parallel on the ARPANET for a while. The 
> Internet Protocol Transition Workbook from November 1981 encouraged new 
> hosts to only implement TCP, not NCP, and says at that point there were 
> TCP-only hosts. On several occasions during 1982, NCP was temporarily 
> blocked, but TCP was allowed. What happened on flag day was that NCP 
> was permanently blocked. 
> 
> So what I was wondering was: were there any VAXen talking NCP, or did 
> they jump straight to TCP? I'd like to see evidence, not handwaving.

Most people reading this thread will all ready know much of the following facts: 
1) ARPANET research begins in 1966 (ARPA becomes DARPA in 1972)
2) A lot of people were writing their own client/server modifications before 1982, and much of it was in assembler
3) The various network modifications were not compatible, so DARPA wanted to develop a newer technology which would allow the various networks to interconnect (this is where the second name, internet, comes from)
4) Many people today do not know that UDP was developed 5-6 years 'after' TCP (many think it was the other way around; UDP was primarily developed to aid in packet routing but today it has many other uses (SIP springs to mind))
5) DARPA needed standardized protocols and code; this would best come from one team. Not sure of all the politics, but much of this work eventually came from a gifted programmer at UC Berkeley by the name of Bill Joy. He did a lot of his work on a VAX running BSD UNIX.  
6) I'm not certain who moved all the assembler code into C, but once that was done, it was distributed amongst all the universities who were running UNIX systems.
7) I knew a lot of people who were running third party stacks on their Windows and Macintosh systems between 1994 and 1998. At that time network communication interfaces all cost a lot of money, so most newbies were asking questions like "how can I be using this internet stack for free?" My answer was always "anything developed by the US tax payer is usually placed into the public domain".

Neil